Google handled 78% of internet searches in 2013
First off, let me clarify, I don’t mean you need someone working full time on your SEO for your site, but you should at least have someone, whether that be inside staff or a marketing consulting agency, ensuring your website is following Google best practices, and tracking whether your site is moving up, moving down or sitting dormant within search engine rankings.
Google head of search Amit Singhal recently posted that Google has made 890 improvements to Google Search last year alone. As Google tweaks their algorithms website rankings will go up and down. What might have been important in the past, becomes less important as Google’s algorithms change (domain name for example). Having an SEO monitoring your site and your website rankings will give you a huge advantage over the competition.
Two years ago almost every new client I worked with knew little if anything about SEO and trying to rank on Google. Now I’m getting many more business owner’s contacting me saying something like “I used to be on the first page of Google, now I’m on the third and my traffic numbers are way down.” There are many factors that can cause this but the most likely reasons are increased competition as your competitors come online and hire SEO specialists, and many people are practicing old SEO techniques that have little impact in the new Google Algorithms.
A good SEO will monitor your site and your top competitors and notice trends that will give your business a competitive advantage. For example, if your SEO may notice you used to be ranked #3 in Google for “Custom Kitchen Cabinets” in Kingston, and two month later your ranking is #9. There is an incredible difference between traffic numbers for a site that ranks 3 vs 9. This could be a result of numerous things, higher competition, high bounce rate (people are clicking on your site and quickly leaving), poor user interface, your site was hacked, or something could be preventing Google from crawling your site – just to name a few.
As search engine’s algorithms evolve and the results inevitably change, make sure you have someone keeping up with the changes – whether that be you as the business owner, or hiring an outside consulting firm. Your bottom line depends on it!
John Shaw
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